Journal of Vocational Education & Training

ISSN: 1363-6820 (Print) 1747-5090 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjve20

A case for advanced skills and employability in higher education Alison Holmes & Stuart Miller To cite this article: Alison Holmes & Stuart Miller (2000) A case for advanced skills and employability in higher education, Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 52:4, 653-664 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13636820000200139

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Date: 19 January 2017, At: 13:40

Journal of Vocational Education and Training, Volume 52, Number 4, 2000

A Case for Advanced Skills and Employability in Higher Education ALISON HOLMES & STUART MILLER The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT This article describes the Case Studies to Advance Skills and Employability (CASE) project and considers the role of case studies in the academic curriculum. The relationship between key skills in higher education and employability skills is discussed. The practicalities of implementing more key skills and employability skills orientated curricula are evaluated. The particular situation of non-vocational subject areas is raised. Outlines of a number of project strands from the CASE project are provided. The factors contributing to the success of CASE as an externally funded project are also reviewed, and employer and consultancy support in particular is described. The article continues beyond the scope of the project itself and concludes by assessing the opportunities for applying case studies of this type in other curricula and then suggesting that this may be the way forward for the embedding of Higher National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) within academic curricula.

Introduction In July 1998 the Universities of Northumbria and Newcastle succeeded in obtaining £50,000 from the Higher Education Regional Development Fund and Tyneside Training and Enterprise Council to introduce employability skills into the curriculum of six subject areas that did not easily and obviously equate with skills development. Not unusually for externally funded projects, the timing did not match the academic year, and the gratefully received funding had, nevertheless, to be spent in 6 months. In six subject areas, deliberately chosen because of the particular challenge posed by each of them, pilot projects were initiated and carried through. The results were fully disseminated. The resultant innovations were then embedded into the standard curriculum. To a very great extent the success of Case Studies to Advance Skills and Employability (CASE) was due to positive inputs made by local employers and by the CONTEXT

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project based in Leeds University. This article is an account of the project, the issues raised and resolved in carrying it through, and how it fits within the national debate about employability, key skills and Higher Level National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) in non-vocational subject areas. Key Skills in Higher Education CASE set out to build upon the work that was already taking place in both of the participating universities. The models for key skills adopted by the Universities of Northumbria and Newcastle cover much the same ground, focusing on transferable skills, which can be used not only during the students’ time at university, but also, more significantly, when they move on to the work place. The key skills identified at Northumbria are: managing and applying intellect; self-management; working with others; effective communication; information technology; use and application of mathematics. These are broken down further into a number of criteria for clarity. In many subject areas, especially those where Business and Technician Education Council (BTEC) Higher National Diploma (HND) teaching is occurring, key skills are enthusiastically mapped onto the curriculum. Often a curriculum will already embrace several key skills through the use of different learning, teaching and assessment strategies. The process of mapping them enables both staff and, more importantly, students to see what they are learning in addition to the curriculum academic content. The awareness of students of key skills, and their relevance to employability, is being raised through the use of personal and academic records (profiles). The use of these instruments requires students to reflect on their personal learning, record their own development and identify what they still need to learn. Of course, as students come into the higher education sector with a wider variety of entry qualifications, many already have a heightened awareness of the meaning and language of key skills. This will also be enhanced by the new Curriculum 2000. The Universities of Northumbria and Newcastle typify the trend in British higher education towards the emphasis on generic skills. This is also the cast internationally by ‘amazing consensus’ according to Ulrich Teichler (1998). He does cloud the waters of the debate by suggesting that the language of skills used by recruiters and the actual specific skills needed for particular professional areas are not always the same. A recent report by the Centre for Higher Education Research and 654

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Information (Brennan, 2000) also remarks on the contradictions and ambiguities that exist about what employers say they want and what they mean: Put much too crudely, employers say they want the sorts of graduates which the new universities believe they are producing, but they actually prefer to select the graduates which the pre-1992 universities produce. Nevertheless, the gist is that higher education curricula are increasingly expected to look beyond graduation and into perceptions, however gained and however ambiguous, of the key skills required for employment. So much for the theory. The problem is that this is not necessarily related to the practical utilisation of key skills beyond the classroom and in the world of work where they really matter. The Case for Employability Skills The policy argument for introducing real-life work experiences into the Higher Education curriculum is, of course, presented in the Dearing Report: students’ strongest motivation for entering higher education was their desire to improve their labour market prospects and .... we see increasingly active partnerships between higher education institutions and the worlds of industry, commerce and public service. (Dearing, 1997) Work experience, however, is not a new feature of the higher education curriculum. Indeed, in certain highly vocationally orientated areas it dates back to the very origin of the sector. It is a changed context that has refocused attention and considerably enhanced the significance of work experience. A degree is no longer enough to guarantee employment. Employers are now looking for additional ingredients, which demonstrate that the graduate has not only acquired academic capabilities, but also developed the key skills that will enable a successful and expeditious transition from education into employment. The vital link is proof of knowledge and experience of the world of work. The situation is summed up by Purcell et al (1999): Graduates with less sought after qualifications and experience consequently need to make a realistic assessment of their skills and competences and the options available to them and find ways of maximising their potential. The onus is on employers who require graduates and undergraduates to develop these, by working in collaboration with higher education institutions.

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The key finding of Working Out? (Purcell et al, 1999) was the importance of work experience in enabling graduates to obtain appropriate employment and, conversely, the extent to which lack of success in the job market was attributed, by graduates, to lack of relevant work experience. It was graduates with Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences and Inter-Disciplinary degrees who were more likely to have experienced difficulty in finding appropriate employment, and also to have opted for postgraduate study. The question is: how are work experience opportunities introduced into an academic curriculum which has no obvious vocational direction? Is Higher Education up to the Job? Although both the Universities of Northumbria and Newcastle have developed models for key skills, and these have been adopted within the institutions, the acceptance of the need to teach and assess key skills is by no means widespread. Many academic staff see their role exclusively in the context of developing students and their knowledge of the academic discipline as the end in itself. It is not their remit to consider employability or key skills. Accordingly, employers are understandably somewhat jaundiced about the ability of higher education to deliver. Hence: The universities do not do enough. Academics fashion courses based on their own perceptions of business needs. This results in a self perpetuating failure to provide what industry needs. Too many academics see industry as a necessary evil which will eventually absorb their graduate output. They have to realise they are growing potential captains of industry. We’re all guilty of putting the emphasis solely on getting good exam results, when we should be developing the person. I would say it is two thirds the person, one third the degree which matters.[1] Even when academic staff do see the merit of addressing key and/or employability skills within their curricula they are faced with the dilemma of whether to approach this by means of special generic units or embedding in core units. The question is aggravated by the tendency of students to regard such elements as irrelevancies or distractions from the main objective, subject development. This is apparent, for instance, in Art and Design programmes where there is a tension between the drive to encourage the individual creativity of artists, and the significance of developing interpersonal skills and networking in order to promote their employment opportunities in the world beyond the art studio.

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Indeed, Art and Design is worth further analysis because it is an area that has been recently the subject of pessimistic studies into the employability of students. There are 72,000 students on Art and Design courses at degree and sub-degree levels at British colleges and universities. This is more than the population of Florence in the Renaissance as Professor Frayling of the Royal College of Arts remarked when he went on to comment: All these people can’t get work. It is wrong for them to have the carrot of a professional career as an artist or designer dangled in front of them. That was all right in the 1950s when the world was different, but it (a guaranteed job) is no longer true today.[2] A recent survey by Harvey & Blackwell (1999), involving 14 institutions and 2000 students, indicates that the development of core/employability skills of Art and Design students is in spite of, rather than because of their higher education course. Many of the students expressed concern at the poor level of contact with the world of work. Only 29% had undertaken any sort of work placement as part of their course. This latter fact is, in part, due to the very nature of the structure of the ‘industry’, where there is a preponderance of self-employed and SMEs with subsequent limited scope for placements. In particular, the respondents identified limitations of skill development in the areas of team working, interpersonal and selfpromotion skills, written communication skills and numeracy skills – all of which are included in the key skills model of the University of Northumbria. Individualism may be the essence of artistic creation, but the products must still meet perceived market demands and be costed, ‘packaged’ and sold as with any other goods or services. Art and Design students need to be both inward and outward looking at the same time. The problem exists on an even larger scale in other subject areas. In Politics and History, for instance, there is no obvious commercial product and, for example, the demand for political aides and company historians is profoundly limited. It is also the case that students themselves feel more and more under pressure as they consider issues of employability and attractiveness to employers at the end of their course. A University of Newcastle Modern Languages group of students confronted with the question of the value of their current programme in ‘fitting’ them for employment and asked to consider the potential value of a module geared to effecting commercial translation, responded thus: I don’t feel at all prepared for the world of work ... I’m frightened at the thought of the adequacy of my preparation for the world of work ... I feel, like many others, a bit intimidated by the idea.

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I ... feel more and more unready – a feeling which causes stress/worry. It would put my mind at ease to know more about vocational language preparation.[3] In fact, this last response should help academic staff to see the additional value of including employability in their curriculum agenda. The academic performance of students is likely to reflect to an extent their perception of their academic studies to future employment. The two, however, are not alternatives confronting each other. At the final dissemination conference of CASE, the Pro ViceChancellor of the University of Newcastle, Madeleine Atkins, took up this point in her remarks about the project strands within CASE: These projects lay to rest the false dichotomy between ‘academic’ and ‘employment related’. They amply demonstrate that you can, and must, integrate traditional intellectual skills and attributes with employment related skills and attributes ... There is interest in blurring the line between teaching and research so that more students get to grips with real problems on the research and development projects that employers have. Instead of neat, tidy but somewhat artificial assignments dreamed up by a lecturer and marked only by that lecturer we are seeing more students working on actual, live, messy untidy projects where solutions will make a difference to a business or organisation, and where the presentation is to the client/employer who also has a role in the assessment of what the student has done.[4]

Case Studies to Advance Skills and Employability (CASE) The arguments for introducing a vocational dimension into the academic curriculum have been outlined earlier. However, the problem is how to introduce skills and employability within subject areas with no obvious vocational interest, and where placements, long or short, are not practicable. In fact, the answer is less directed by the nature of the subject and more by applications outside the classroom, and the real challenges where the possibility of failure and the need to reconsider approaches is genuine, the workplace. A Few Cases in Point ... From October 1998 to March 1999 the CASE project demonstrated how real-life situations could be harnessed to the academic curricula of six non-vocational subject areas at the two collaborating universities. Skills for Public Sculpture. This scheme was based on the University of Northumbria’s BA (Hons) Fine Art degree. Students underwent a course

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of training in all of the aspects of public sculpture that drew upon the expertise of a health and safety specialist, town planner and architect. Students also received academic instruction in making sculpture maquettes, and actually participated in a live competition for a real sculpture commission based upon the use of recycled metal from amnesty weapons handed in to the Northumbria Police following the Dunblane tragedy. The winner of the competition was to be engaged to produce the sculpture for siting outside a newly built police station. The competition judges were the Deputy Chief Constable, Station Superintendent and University Vice Chancellor. The various stages of the project were recorded by a media studies student who was commissioned to produce a video of acceptable commercial quality. This was edited into a training video that, together with notes, is available to artists or student artists intending to pursue opportunities for public sculpture work. The students were thus required to exercise and develop the skills of thinking, numeracy, communication and time management. They were also introduced to the importance of networking in order to pursue opportunities for commissions. Waste Minimisation. The University of Northumbria Division of Geography and Environmental Management selected a scheme that was based on the use of a scenario built around waste management and a mythical company using local companies as genuine data sources. During a 6-hour exercise, a group of students drawn from both universities acted as the decision makers. They used real-life employer consultants, background technical and financial information, and decided which options to pursue. The variables were then changed so that the students were required to adapt their strategies. In this way, having to confront ‘real world’ based problems and under the judgmental eye of real employers, the skills that were drawn upon and emphasised were teamwork, numeracy, communication and managing intellect. Human Organisation. The Division of Sociology at the University of Northumbria elected to develop a package of materials to underpin a case study assignment focusing on the analysis of human organisations, and to pilot the materials using student organised and led focus groups. The students were also expected to base their assignment on some form of placement experience. As more and more students work to support their studies, the opportunity to use their part-time work place as a learning opportunity was recognised. An open learning package was produced which enabled students to unlock this resource, and to act in the capacity of a management consultant or policy analyst. Vocational Translation. The German Department at the University of Newcastle devised an entirely new stage 2 module designed to address the problem of the employability of modern languages students. The module aims are to allow students to apply linguistic skills acquired at 659

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stage one to a practical translation project. This means that students experience the problems and opportunities of translation in the workplace as a professional activity. Emphasis is placed on the improvement of linguistic ability and translation techniques, the fostering of key skills, which include team-working, communication, problemsolving, independent planning and organising, as well as netskills. In effect the students undertake the role of commercial translators and carry through the translation of a substantial component of technical or commercial material on the basis of a costed estimate and delivery schedule. This is carried out in the ‘real world’ by approaching employers and promoting the service, or by making use of reserve material and collaborating employers if business is not so good! An Environmental Issues Conference. Anyone who has had to organise a substantial conference or similar event will readily agree that it demands a wide range of skills. The students of the University of Newcastle Politics Department through a pilot for a 20 credit level 3 module organised a conference in December 1999. The student group selected the themes and commissioned appropriate speakers on the basis of negotiated briefs for presentations and workshops. All the domestic arrangements were made by the students, and the convoluted networking and communications managed by them. They had the benefit of the involvement of an environmental consultant from a local firm who had considerable experience in organising events. They also negotiated and readily obtained the help and involvement of the Environment Agency, and sponsorship by various organisations. Visual Arts Futures. In an area as individualistic as fine art there is a requirement to demonstrate the various routes into commissions and the key skills necessary to exploit those routes. In this University of Newcastle strand of the project a form of structured career pathways event was built into the curriculum of a relevant model. It was designed to introduce undergraduates to different role models in a range of art and design areas, to enable students to encounter ‘employers’ such as Regional Arts Officers and to illustrate the generic transferable skills that are needed in a highly competitive world. The Value of Employer and Consultancy Support CASE was a complex project delivered in a compressed time span and owed much to support from two directions. First of all it enjoyed, and in its later manifestations still enjoys, considerable employer support. Employers were expected, in the original proposal, to be involved in every subject strand. They were also, as is common with externally funded activities, represented on the steering group. There is no doubt that the chosen employers, once committed,

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gave substantial support to the project. However, there was an expectation that the employers’ skills were being utilised. In fact, it was one of the discernible features of CASE overall that despite fears of ‘employer overload’ in working with the ever-importunate higher education sector, employers were actually more than happy to be involved as long as their role was clear, practical and of benefit to students, rather than mere tokenism to enable the ticking of a box on a project evaluation report. In CASE, the employers played a part right up to the last moment. The second invaluable level of support came from CONTEXT. Based at the University of Leeds this project has as its remit the encouragement of the interaction of higher education and the world of employment by means of the development and use of case-study materials in education. The aims of CONTEXT are to find sponsorship to develop new case materials, to make contacts in organisations to establish real world contexts for academic learning, and to train academic staff in using and authoring case-study material. A wide range of companies have already collaborated with CONTEXT in the production of case materials including, for example, BT, Boots plc, Courtaulds Textiles, Marks and Spencer, McDonald’s Restaurants and the Royal Navy. CASE benefited from ongoing advice and the CONTEXT lateral thinking consultancy throughout its short, but effective time span. It does take outside expertise and perceptions to steer around potential institutional log jams generated from a mind-set which naturally views the world in terms of semester schedules, validation timetables and curriculum overload. This advice and support was based upon the insight gained from the accumulated experience of other projects that had worked with CONTEXT. Contact details for CONTEXT are given at the end of this article. It is important to note a critical issue, which was the identification and involvement of students at a point in their timetable that was inconvenient. This was resolved through a combination of incentives, prizes and appeals to personal self-interest. The latter is more effective than might be expected. As two students of German remarked: ‘It shows the employers that you have some experience of the real world’ and ‘... these skills ... will make us stand out from other Language students ...’. Opportunities for Transferability and Re-use In fact, all of the CASE strands were built into units at the two universities. The project demonstrated the effectiveness of the limited pilot approach. A group of committed staff involved in the project met regularly, and compared notes during the visits by the CONTEXT consultant and embedded their work into the mainstream curriculum at the appropriate levels. In at least one case this did produce some tension 661

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between the ‘traditionalist’ subject syllabus orientated group and the advocates of drawing in an employability component. In most of the six strands the result was also the creation of materials that could be used in the future either at the two universities or elsewhere. These have included video, open-learning packs and CD roms. There is no reason why strand models cannot be taken up and used in other subject areas. In fact, one of the examples used at the University of Northumbria was a programme in the Department of the Built Environment, which has long employed case study material in this way, and even makes use of students as consultant advisers to members of the public who have minor building problems, and in marketing and negotiating the letting of commercial properties. There is, logically speaking, no limit to CASE. The principles of the Vocational Translation project can be applied in any language. Conferences can be organised for any subject and on any topic. Consultancy and advice can be provided for a wide variety of subjects and issues. The need to make decisions from a range of options in a world of shifting patterns applies in many contexts. Case Studies and the Scope for Higher NVQs In the subject areas used by CASE the use of NVQs is at low levels. There are projects exploring the possibility of integrating NVQs into the academic curricula of subjects that are traditionally not skill orientated. At the Universities of Newcastle and Northumbria there is the successful collaborative mentoring project Students into Schools, which uses NVQ standards. Another collaborative project Experience Works enables students to gain credit for part-time extra curricular work. However, it may be that a more fruitful line of development is to seek to integrate NVQs initially into employability skill developments designed to coexist with and support the academic curriculum. After all, a brief review of the key skills addressed in the above six projects matches the main criteria of NVQ level 4 and even NVQ level 5. Their emphasis on personal responsibility and autonomy, on application of a range of key principles and techniques, with ultimate accountability for analysis and diagnosis, design, planning, execution and evaluation, have real applicability to the world of conference organisation, public sculpture competitions and waste minimisation policy determination. Admittedly, this is within a relatively confined sector of the overall degree programme of the students concerned. However, the scope is there for a reconciliation of subject content, employability skills and the concept of standardised assessment of competences. There is much to be said for approaching NVQ accreditation through sandwich years and other formal placements that receive only a pass/fail, and developing from that base into non-placement courses. The 662

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provision of evidence for NVQs could be obtained from a CASE project unit and used dually for both the academic reward and the NVQ reward. The Future: upper CASE? The CASE strands have been embedded at the two participating universities, and staff training programmes included units on the experience and value of CASE. There can be little doubt that the future rests increasingly with this type of approach because of the needs of paying students confronted with an increasingly competitive jobs market, and because of the vocationalism of the academic curriculum associated with the stress on key skills, emphasis on employer links by the Quality Assurance Agency, and the opportunity to use student experience to contribute to the final award which enables a more rounded and employable graduate to emerge. Acknowledgement Alison Holmes and Stuart Miller were both working at the Quality Enhancement Unit, Registrar’s Department, University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne when this article was written. Correspondence Alison Holmes, Centre for Higher Education Practice, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, United Kingdom. Notes Advice and assistance in the development and use of case study materials is available from CONTEXT (http://context.tlsu.leeds.ac.uk) Further information about CASE, and copies of Case Studies to Advance Skills and Employability: Final Report (DfEE and Tyneside TEC, 1999) are available from MARCET at the University of Northumbria (tel. +44 (0) 191 227 4186. Alternatively, you can visit the CASE web site (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ADU/case/case.html). [1] Christine Holland of the North East Chamber of Commerce quoting a selection of Tyneside employers at the CASE conference ‘Prepared to Work’, May 1999. [2] ‘Students of art “have no chance of getting jobs”’, The Independent, 4 December 1999. [3] Extracts from a Modern Languages student evaluation report on CASE. The remarks are fairly typical of those made in other subject areas.

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Alison Holmes & Stuart Miller [4] Madeleine Atkins, Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, speaking at the CASE conference ‘Prepared to Work’, 14 May 1999.

References Brennan, J. (2000) Graduate Employment: a review of issues. London: Centre for Higher Education Research and Information. Dearing, R. (1997) Higher Education in the Learning Society, National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Harvey, L. & Blackwell, A. (1999) Destinations and Reflections: careers of British Art, Craft and Design graduates. Birmingham: University of Central England. Purcell, K., Pitcher, J. & Simm, C. (1999) Working Out? Graduates Early Experiences of the Labour Market. Birmingham: Central Services Unit. Teichler, U. (1998) Higher Education and the World of Work: changing conditions and challenges, paper presented at the UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education, Paris, March.

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